A 2008 rewind: Which loss was more embarrassing?

Tennessee came in with moderate expectations, ranked (for the last time till present) and coming off a SEC Championship appearance. Playing on the other coast against a below average PAC 10 opponent who was starting a third string QB. To me, watching that game in a hole in the wall Florida bar told me all i needed to know about our future, and it was quite bleak.

Wyoming.. To me, was after the fact, of course they should have won that game but at that point we had a lost season and a dead man walking coach.
I'm not taking any blame away from Fulmer for that Memphis-like loss to Wyoming, but fact is the UCLA loss set the stage for the nightmare known as 2008 and on a national stage at that.
The Memphis loss to me will always be the biggest head scratcher in the Fulmer regime, but to me the Wyoming game wasn't the biggest black eye of that 2008 season. UCLA had no business being within two touchdowns of us. It was the most embarrassing loss of the year and i still stick by that.

Opposing fans don't remind you 3, 5, 10 years down the road about a loss at UCLA. Drop a game to Wyoming at home and you hear about it for a while.

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Volfanbill and I paid 20 bucks for two tickets in the lower bowl, some of the best tickets we've ever had to a game. And the best part of the game was the 90-year old man behind us that told the world's best dirty jokes.

The UCLA game might have been the worst coached football game of all time. Complete and total failure in all three facets of the game. I have a very hard time believing my high school's football coaching staff couldn't have led us to a fairly comfortable victory.

I agree with WM. I remember just going into Neyland for the Wyoming with no expectations and my only hope was that we would score 21 points so I could get me some free wiper fluid from Advanced Auto. The loss wasn't surprising at all. Not only did we laugh about the old man's dirty jokes, but we laughed at how inept our entire offense was. Still a head scratcher how we beat Vandy the next week and then went out and just dominated UK the next week from start to finish.

Wyoming was more embarrassing, but i agree with you that it was after the fact. The team played like they were at a funeral. I actually chalked UCLA up as a team in transition, traveling cross country that should have one but didn't. I was upset and disappointed, but it happens.

More embarrassing to me was the fact that we couldn't do anything against anybody that was any good. Florida reamed us. There was that offensive abomination at Auburn. UGa drilled us. Bama manhandled us. By the time Carolina beat us like a step child, it was clear that we were not close to the level of the good teams and the coaching staff had no idea what to do about it. Clawson was telling us the players were too dumb to understand his system, and Fulmer was starting whichever quarterback won the weekly poll in the Tennessean.

Still a head scratcher how we beat Vandy the next week and then went out and just dominated UK the next week from start to finish.

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I guess it is something that the staff was able to gather the troops in those two games, but the formula wasn't complicated. We stopped trying to run the Clawfense, abandoned the pass completely, and ran over them.

Wyoming was more embarrassing, but i agree with you that it was after the fact. The team played like they were at a funeral. I actually chalked UCLA up as a team in transition, traveling cross country that should have one but didn't. I was upset and disappointed, but it happens.

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I was actually in full-on freak out mode after the UCLA game. I was thinking 3-win season after that. Ironically, one of the teams I thought we'd still beat was Wyoming.

That UCLA team was absolutely horrendous and we should have been able to beat them without any of our starters.

Opposing fans don't remind you 3, 5, 10 years down the road about a loss at UCLA. Drop a game to Wyoming at home and you hear about it for a while.

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This is where I am. The UCLA loss was brutal as well, but losing to Wyoming at home seems like it'll be the one you remember most years from now, especially to a non-fan of the program who either doesn't know or will eventually forget the details of that season.

I was actually in full-on freak out mode after the UCLA game. I was thinking 3-win season after that. Ironically, one of the teams I thought we'd still beat was Wyoming.

That UCLA team was absolutely horrendous and we should have been able to beat them without any of our starters.

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I'm not disagreeing with your view in hindsight. At the time, I saw it as a situation where we didn't play well and lost an OT game across the country that we should have won. The embarrassment set in for me when it became clear that not playing well is what we did, pretty much all the time. That started in the Florida game, really took root against Auburn, and was a mushroom cloud after Northern Illinois.

My father, for the record, was with you. He told me the next morning that there was no way in hell UT would get bowl eligible.

Bama will always have ULM. It's what games mean the most to me personally and the UCLA was this feeling in pit of my stomach knowing this football powerhouse was dying a slow death. Most of the football landscape didn't care about us by the time the Wyoming game came around, they saw as for who we really were the first game of the year.
Bama had their upset but were going in the exact opposite direction than where we were going. Nobody gives a rats ass about the ULM game anymore but it happened.
In the end though, [uck fay] Wyoming and UCLA.

This is a tough one. I flew my rear end out to LA for the UCLA game and it seemed obvious to me we had a better football team and just completely mismanaged that game, letting Crompty throw worm burners all over the field when they couldn't stop our ground game and then letting that juco transfer QB who threw 4 first half picks take them down the field and score that TD...but I have to say Wyoming..though I don't blame the players for being upset or whatever after Fulmer got fired, it still seems like after all the ruckus they raised and talking they did after the firing they could've gone out there with a better effort against a crappy team far inferior to UCLA.

UCLA. I was in LA for that game. Lowest point as a Vol fan. Having some [uck fay]ing asian kid who doesn't know a first down from a first order derivative talk shit to you after the game and you can't say shit.

And we would have won that game by 21 if we had done nothing else but run the ball off-tackle. Four interceptions and we lost. [uck fay] Crompton. [uck fay] Clawson. [uck fay] all those mother [uck fay]ers as a staff, a record label, and as a mother [uck fay]ing crew. And if you wanna be down with the '08 gang, then [uck fay] you too.